The PNV spokesperson in Congress, Aitor Esteban, a veteran following 20 years in the house and several awards from parliamentary journalists for his skill and talent, appears in a hallway of the Lower House looking overwhelmed and upset. He mumbles some complaints and doesn’t stop. It is Tuesday in mid-January and comes from the weekly meeting of the Board of Spokespersons, the body in which, together with the Board, decisions on organization and calendar are made. Esteban has just left the meeting early, tired of the long interventions of the new PP spokesperson, Miguel Tellado. It is already the second consecutive week that he has done it. Tellado’s tone, the disqualifications of his opponents in meetings with a theoretically more technical than political aspect, have not only ended Esteban’s patience. All the other parliamentary groups, with the exception of Vox, confess to being exasperated by the attitude of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s faithful collaborator.
Tellado, according to coincident versions of the other groups, is dedicated to giving what they describe as “rallies” of up to 15 minutes. In a closed-door forum, without the public or journalists, the PP spokesperson uses his political arguments to attack the Government and its partners in a tone that all sources describe as very aggressive and on issues that do not even appear on the agenda. day. The spokespersons for the other groups declare themselves perplexed and assure that nothing like this has ever happened: using in an internal meeting the same speeches and political attacks that are used for public combat.
Those present at those meetings describe attitudes such as when Tellado disqualified Sumar’s spokesperson, Marta Lois, telling her that “her party is going to dismiss her soon.” So much is the irritation that it has sown that in a recent meeting the spokesperson for EH Bildu, Mertxe Aizpurua, asked whether it would not be necessary to rate intervention times as in public debates. Some of the spokespersons consulted claim that they have noticed signs of discomfort in other members of the PP present at the meetings due to the belligerent attitude of their spokesperson.
In public, the PP spokesperson has called the president Pedro Sánchez’s “23rd minister of the Government” and a “bought referee.” He has accused her of hiding for days a report from the Justice Commission’s lawyers that raises doubts regarding the constitutionality of the amnesty law proposal. The lawyer who signed that document clarified before the commission that this accusation was false. Tellado appeared before the press following this rectification, although to toughen his attacks once morest Armengol. What’s more, he wanted to raise the issue at a Meeting of Spokespersons convened on Thursday without the presence of Armengol, who was on sick leave, until the first vice president, the socialist Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, prevented him from doing so, alleging that the matter did not appear in the order of the day.
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The president has declined to comment on what happens in the internal meetings of the Chamber. Parliamentary sources indicated that weeks ago Armengol asked Tellado to have a personal meeting, with no response until now.
Sources from the PP state that the other groups are trying to silence him and use as examples the performance of Gómez de Celis in the last Meeting of Spokespersons or the suggestion by the EH Bildu spokesperson to estimate intervention times. “The PP is not going to stop denouncing in all the institutions where it has representation, especially in the Congress of Deputies, the concessions of Pedro Sánchez to the independence movement, as is the case of the amnesty law,” respond the same sources when being questioned by complaints regarding the behavior of their spokesperson. Tellado, they add, “he will continue to ask for full explanations every time the president continues to twist or manipulate the Rules of the House to row in favor of the Government and subject Congress to the dictates of the president.”
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